As I wondered at this strange alliance of the dirt poor with the mega-rich, I remembered that in 2004 Thomas Frank wondered about how the Republicans had managed to convince the poor to vote against their best interests. Frank’s answer, or part of his answer, is that the Republicans use “social issues,” such as gay marriage and Janet Jackson’s exposed nipple to work up indignation over the threat to moral values posed by liberal Democrats.
Exactly. And what's really sad and pathetic is that this manipulation tactic was being successfully employed against the working poor as far back as the
19th century (during the so-called "Gilded Age"):
“It wasn’t necessary to assault democracy so frontally. The American ‘party-system provided America’s industrializing elites with the insulation they needed against the challenges to which the prior establishment of democratic institutions made them vulnerable,’ writes Andrew Martin, an interpreter of [Walter Dean] Burnham’s work. The party system—the structure and terms of political competition—insulated industrialism [read: corporate fascism] from democracy through
a politics of distraction, based on the manipulation of real hatreds and sham issues.”
“From the Greenbackers in the late 1870s to the Populists in the early 1890s, the two-party duopoly successfully co-opted insurgencies and either defused anger with ‘reform’ or
channeled it into cultural issues. ‘Political conflict is not like an intercollegiate debate in which the opponents agree in advance on the definition of the issue,’ E. E. Schattschneider writes in
The Semisovereign People. “
As a matter of fact, the definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power….He who determines what politics is about runs the country.’ As Plato dramatized in the allegory of the cave, power gets to say what counts as real.”
“In his
People’s Party Paper, Tom Watson, the Populist congressman from Georgia, appealed to white and black farmers to meet on common ground: ‘You are kept apart that you may be fleeced separately of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of the financial despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars both.’”
To the pick-up truck driver, standing up for America means standing up for bankster bailouts and the military/security complex’s multi-trillion dollar wars.
And no matter how calmly, rationally or slooowly you try to explain to that pick-up truck driver that the governmental policies he's "standing up" for are actually
destroying America, he'll still throw a tantrum. Why? Because like most other adults in this country, he's an arrested-development child in a grown person's body, and accordingly thinks he already knows everything (even though in reality he doesn't know anything, save for what the score of the last ball game was). And that, of course, is exactly the sort of person the
compulsory school system was, and is, designed to produce.
The same brainwashed Americans who rage against Obamacare and are lined up to vote for Romney are oblivious to the fact...
They're not merely oblivious to it, but
willfully oblivious. Big difference.
...that Romney, while governor of the eastern liberal Democratic state of Massachusetts, had his version of Obamacare enacted at the state level.
Which is why it should be called ObamneyCare.
The greatest irony about Obamacare is that it was written by the private insurance companies and diverts Medicaid and Medicare funds to their profits. It is socialized medicine alright, but it is socialism for the private insurance companies.
Which is the very
opposite of
single payer -- a fact that seems to remain lost on both sides of the health care debate.
All it took to convince Red staters to go along with the military/security complex squandering $6 trillion on the Iraq and Afghan wars was yellow ribbon decals and a slogan, “support the troops.”
Yup. This is a time-proven method of "
manufacturing consent." It's worked like a charm for many decades.
Apparently, flag-waving Republican patriots are not bothered when their presidential candidate announces that as soon as he is in office he will turn over US foreign policy to Netanyahu and send more americans to death and bankruptcy for Netanyahu.
These phony "patriots" aren't bothered by anything as long as a Republican politician has wrapped it in the American flag.
Americans elected Obama president expecting that he would restore the rule of law.
Even though, as Senator, Obama had voted both to re-authorize Bush's Bill of Rights-shredding "Patriot" Act and to legalize warrantless wiretapping (after saying he wouldn't).
Instead, he codified the Bush regime’s transgressions and added some of his own.
And Hollywood "liberals" all worship him for it.
So which do you want? The Republican panderer to the rich and Israel whose foreign policy is war or the Democrat panderer to the rich and Israel whose foreign policy is war? As Gerald Celente wrote in the July issue of the Trends Journal, americans “argue among themselves why their freak is better than the other freak. They will get angry with you if you call their freak a freak. They will actually fight and die to defend their freaks.”
Obviously an accurate observation, only I think "freak" is much too mild a term. For me, terms like "criminal" and "con artist" come to mind. A "freak" could be someone you meet at a hemp fest.
It is extraordinary that millions of americans actually believe fervently that it matters whether Romney freak or Obama freak gets elected.
It's also ridiculous beyond words, because it's not like we haven't been through all this numerous times before, only to see the same
NWO agenda continue unabated.
If americans had any sense, they would stay home and not vote. The 1% control the country, and the 99% had just as well own up to it and stay at home.
Bingo! If you vote for Obamney, you're
consenting to your own enslavement to a handful or
ruling-class parasites.
The US is ruled by a private oligarchy. The government is merely their front.
And both Romney supporters and Obama supporters are equally devoted to
ignoring this fact, because to openly acknowledge it would spoil the fun of treating electoral politics as just another spectator sport.
The oligarchs have succeeded in making americans a dispossessed majority in their own country. In November Americans will again give their approval to one of the oligarchy’s two candidates.
Of course, and that means they'll be dragging those of us who are actually informed right over the cliff with them.
Thanks a bunch,
lesser-evil voters!
